Derek Bourgeois, composer and conductor – obituary

Derek Bourgeois, who has died aged 75, was a music teacher, conductor and prolific composer; as director of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in the 1980s and 1990s he took his young musicians to musical heights that included a remarkable appearance at the Proms in 1987, when they performed Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder under Pierre Boulez with Jessye Norman as soloist.

Bourgeois wrote an astonishing 116 symphonies, most of them written in retirement. They were rarely, if ever, performed, although several contained flashes of humour. While Haydn’s Symphony No 45 (known as The Farewell) has the players leaving the stage one by one, Bourgeois’s No 45 had them entering one by one.

Fearing that No 9 might, like that of Beethoven or Schubert, be his last, he made it “a big one” lasting two hours. No 32 matched the record of Havergal Brian and so was written in the style of that eccentric...